Two distinguishing features of the Ixa Group are mainly that we deal with a less resourced language (Basque) and that we combine linguistic modelling and data analysis with innovative probabilistic and machine learning approaches to NLP. Those characteristics lead us to face Language Technology with a characteristic strategy.

Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people. It is likely that an early form of the Basque language was already present in Western Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages. Nowadays, Basque is a minority language with very different linguistic features compared to its main neighbouring languages (Spanish, French or English). It is an agglutinative language, with a rich inflectional morphology; for example each adjective may tackes,at least 360 word forms.

Our research has resulted in state-of-the-art technology for robust, broad-coverage natural-language processing for Basque. These technologies include a spelling checker (Xuxen), a machine translation system (OpenTrad), Basque wordnet (BasWN), the corpus of Science and Technology (ZT corpus) and a syntactically annotated corpus (EPEC). For information about more resources, tools and applications see the products page.